With a soft lilt, Yara began to read Stone Soup, a bedtime story about hungry travelers who persuade recalcitrant villagers to make them dinner. She hesitated on a few words, and I offered a bit of help with her pronunciation. Otherwise, Yara sailed through the story with aplomb.

Our session, lighthearted and quick, felt like a sit-down with my own children but with an extra jolt of triumph. Yara, 14, read to me from her home in Lebanon via Kindi, a reading buddy smartphone app that lets her work on her English anytime she feels like it.

For Yara, learning English is both a passion and a predicament. She's a Syrian refugee living in Saadnayel, Lebanon, about an hour east of Beirut, which is currently home to more than 35,000 Syrians. The team of developers and designers building the app has worked there for more than a year in an all-girls' school operated by a Lebanese nonprofit, the Kayany Foundation.

Before Kindi, Yara had no one to practice with. Though it wearied her, she would study alone for hours every day, determined to boost her language skills. The app gives her a way to reach out and find someone to practice with—and they can be anywhere in the world.

Kindi (whose name was inspired by 9th-century Muslim philosopher al-Qindi) is still in beta, and I was the first non-Arabic speaker to use it with one of the 15 Syrian students who are testing it. From my desk in Maryland, I could short-press a word on my screen, and it would highlight in yellow on Yara's end, alerting her to an issue with the word. A long-press added the word to a practice list at the end of the story.

In a call with another student, we found that natural hesitations around tough words were good moments to do a quick correction, just as I do when my own children read to me. Our call, conducted over voice-over-IP (VoIP), was crystal clear.

Mike Clarke, one of a team of three working to develop the app, was ecstatic.

"I'm happy it worked!" he said afterward. "It hasn't been easy to get to this point, so it's really exciting to start seeing things come together."

Kindi came to life after Clarke and his collaborators, graphics designer Leen Naffaa and computer scientist Ahmad Ghizzawi, were accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Refugee Learning Accelerator (RLA) in late 2017. The three had collaborated on various United Nations initiatives in previous years and were drawn to the accelerator as a way to advance a passion project.

"We would like to be able to create a world where every person, regardless of location and financial means, always has someone to learn with," Clarke said. "There are kids who go to bed every night without someone to read with. It's easier for someone to swipe through Tinder than it is for a kid to find someone to read with. That's unacceptable."

Accelerating Learning

The unique MIT accelerator's overarching goal from the start was to build capacity—to foster a new network of connections between the tech and Syrian refugee communities in Jordan and Lebanon, said Genevieve Barrons, who led the RLA through July 2018. Rather than functioning as the usual tech-world startup factory, the RLA instead sought out interdisciplinary Middle East-based teams who were interested in addressing a persistent problem in the region: access to education for Syrian refugees.

Since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, an estimated 5.5 million Syrians have been forced from their homes, fleeing a country torn by civil war. Though some have filtered across oceans to settle in Europe, Canada, and the United States, the majority escaped to nearby Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq. Syrian refugees have faced brutally cold winters in substandard shelters, evictions from temporary camps, ongoing harassment, and crippling lack of access to resources, including education.

In an article for University World News, Barrons wrote that prior to the start of the war, around a quarter of the Syrian population was enrolled in post-secondary education. Yet without transcripts or a way to prove their knowledge and skills, educated Syrians who left to resettle in a new country were left with few options to find work or to continue a university degree program.

And that's just one facet of the problem: Nearly 50 percent of all Syrian refugees are under the age of 18, meaning younger learners are at particular risk of falling into an educational gap from which they may never recover.

"These kids basically didn't go to school for four years," said Omar Khan, a Toronto-based Syrian refugee advocate who has been working closely with the RLA project as a consultant. Forced to find work to help support their families, younger refugees also often lack money or transportation to get to school. Those who do make it to class go after work in the afternoon, struggling with overcrowded classrooms and exhausted, overworked teachers.

So when MIT put out its call for applicants, it specified that they should already be working in the region and be interested in developing some kind of innovative, tech-facing solution to help Syrian refugees continue to learn and advance. And that's not just the reading, writing, and arithmetic of the primary grade years but also note-taking and idea-sharing for high schoolers, how to help college graduates find work in the absence of transcripts that were left behind, and how to match job-seekers to appropriate work given the skills they already have.

Teams comprised designers, engineers, and computer scientists from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine. Out of the initial 74 teams that applied, 40 were selected for the first round. The six-week intensive remote course familiarized them with the finer details of the refugee education situation on the ground in Lebanon and Jordan.

Of that group, 20 teams went on to a workshop in Amman, Jordan, held in January 2018. There, the teams and MIT coordinators met one another for the first time and had opportunities to connect and chat with local nonprofits, universities, and other organizations involved in the education sector in the Middle East.

"Many of them live there and see the problem to a degree, but even when they visited the NGOs and nonprofits and met refugees, it was their first time engaging with refugee kids on the ground," Khan said.

Brainstorms

Some of the ideas brought to the workshop were bold. Many involved the use of smartphones, a ubiquitous technology in the region despite spotty internet access in many places.

Beirut by Byte sought to build an active feedback tool for high school teachers to take a quick read of how well their students understood a particular concept or problem. Using a Bluetooth clicker, a teacher would then be able to group students together to facilitate better peer-to-peer learning. Edutek, an interactive offline and online platform, aimed to fill gaps in Syrian students' understanding of Jordanian math curriculum.

The PEDD team looked to augmented reality (AR) to solve a problem of translation: Although courses are taught in Arabic, many of the course materials and books are in English. PEDD's AR application would allow a student to pull out his or her smartphone and view notes, clarifications, annotations, and links to resources other students had posted to that page of the text.

In the end, only a handful teams made it to the final phase. The finalists were tasked with securing a partnership with a local organization in order to receive additional funding for prototype testing, the stage Kindi is currently in.

One of the nonprofits hoping to partner up with an RLA team was Molham Team, a crowdfunding platform that raises funds for humanitarian campaigns and medical relief for Syrian refugees. Molham also builds schools and other facilities for displaced people.

Khaled Abdul Wahed, Molham Team's coordinator for educational centers, is a refugee himself who's now living in Toronto. Wahed said he was hopeful that a partnership might emerge with one of the RLA teams to help connect professionals from within the Middle East with those at universities outside the region—perhaps something as simple as funds to coordinate regular Skype or WhatsApp chat sessions to improve Syrians' English skills.

Though a partnership didn't come through on this round, Khan noted that Molham Team's work is a prime example of an organization saying, "Hey, we have this problem, and we need help working on it." It's an exceedingly difficult reality to find the right mix of factors to respond to those needs.

Roadblocks

Many of the teams had high hopes that shiny new tech—say, augmented reality, virtual reality, and AI chatbots—would be a panacea for nonprofits and other agencies. But Khan said that just because it's fast and fun doesn't mean it's the right way—a common problem in Silicon Valley that cropped up here, halfway around the world.

"It's one of the hardest things in tech: that people have a problem they want to work on, and then the actual problem on the ground," Khan said. "And the problem on the ground is often not sexy, but it needs to be solved. There's a lot of hype for AR and VR and chatbots all over the world, so the question becomes: If you want to use one of these technologies to help, what's that way? People can be so [dazzled by] the newest tech that they need someone to push back and say, does this even make sense?"

Clarke, a New Jersey native, said one of the reasons Kindi seems to have really clicked is its simplicity.

"For me personally, coming from working in startups in New York, you see everyone trying to make some crazy new innovation—this project is so beautiful because it's so simple," he said. "We're not creating some crazy algorithm; it's literally just kids who have no one to read a bedtime story with and now have someone to read with."

That's not to say there weren't the usual endless revisions and versions and user testing headaches. Kindi is in its fifth iteration, and Naffaa said she has lost track of how many times the user screens have been redesigned, stripped down, and simplified to make them ever more intuitive.

The iteration has paid off. Students have taken to the app, and even their families look on with interest. Brothers grab phones away from the girls to start their own reading sessions.

However, Clarke said, there's another feature of the Middle Eastern landscape that makes it difficult even for simple success stories like this to take root and flourish.

"So often, the aid space isn't based on what beneficiaries actually want or the impact you're making, but what the donors want," Clarke said. "So even if you're kicking ass, there's no guarantee of what's happening next year with funding."

Add to that the physical hostility of the environment, and it's no wonder that tech projects here rarely find the traction they need to get going. While riding his bike to the school site where Kindi has been working over the last year, Clarke was struck by a car. He was unharmed; the bike wasn't so lucky.

"Trying to build things in this environment requires an immense amount of perseverance," Clarke said.

That said, language-learning ventures are one of the hottest spaces in traditional digital markets today: The Chinese company VIPKid, which offers one-on-one language services between users in China and the United States, was recently valued at over $3 billion [corrected 10/16/18].

Lasting Impact

Along with Kindi, other startups currently field-testing their ideas include Amal. This employment-focused tool helps Syrians learn about their legal right to work in Jordan, typical workplace conditions, and necessary skills and certifications for specific jobs. Amal also aims to act as a match-up service between prospective Jordanian employers and skilled Syrian partners, as well as to provide customized education and training information for youths.

As for Kindi, the team is about to roll out a more polished, functional version this autumn in Saadnayel to each of the 125 girls studying at Kayany school.

In addition to Yara, I also read with Fatima, a 15-year-old determined to one day be a lawyer. Her direct experiences with the ills and injustices of war led her to the decision, she told Kindi's Leen Naffaa. After our call, Fatima sent Clarke an ecstatic message on WhatsApp about the session: "I am so so so happy!"

This prompted me to ask Clarke for my own little language-learning session, a phrase in Arabic I might use to tell my reading partners they did a good job. Clarke said that future versions would have icebreaker features just like this for additional back-and-forth cultural education.

"I'll never forget the first time I had a session with Fatima," Naffaa said. "She started laughing, and said she couldn't believe she was talking to me and we're both seeing the same thing at the same time. Every time we have a session, the students start laughing and saying they can't believe they're doing this."

Karine, one of Fatima's teachers, said the app has made waves at the school where she teaches English to the Syrian girls.

"When we first used the app, the school bell rang and students were still seated because they were engaged in their reading session," Karine said. "Now, when they come to class, they give me a summary of a story they read at home using the application, without being asked to. There is a different level of excitement achieved while students are using Kindi."

The app is already starting to creep beyond its original scope, which has intrigued Clarke. New users are starting to request access from Syria, where learning materials are often confiscated or destroyed at checkpoints if they're deemed suspicious by authorities. Kindi is a way around that.

"The app offers these kids a different way to experience the world, and connect to people that they never thought would be possible," Clarke said. "It opens up their world a lot more than it currently is."

This story first appeared in the ad-free, curated PCMag Digital Edition, available on iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms.

About the Author

Michelle Z. Donahue is a freelance science and technology journalist based near Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic News, Wired, and Popular Science. She harbors a not-so-secret hope that rocket launches will soon be as simple as calling an Uber.

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